Dotcom says German authors' society canned Mega launch vid

Another day, another controversy: storage locker launcher Kim Dotcom says a video of the all-singing, all-dancing party at which the ON switch was flicked for his new Mega service was taken down from YouTube on suspicion of copyright naughtiness after a request from German authors' society GEMA.

Dotcom made his allegation in three Tweets, embedded below:

Incredible: The GEMA in Germany took down our #Mega launch press conference video from Youtube for copyright claims.

The video in question certainly displays some odd qualities: despite having just over 300 views at the time of writing, it has received over 500 thumbs' ups. But comments on the video start at the same time as Dotcom's tweet announcing it is live, and there appears to be no break in the comment stream.

At the time of writing, GEMA was silent on the matter. Its Facebook and Twitter feeds made no mention of the incident. The organisation is, however, negotiating with YouTube over payments to its members and is not shy of pointing out infringing video to the Google offshoot.

It's hard to know if GEMA really pointed out the video to YouTube. It's less difficult to imagine Dotcom stirring up additional interest in his new service by pushing his – to describe it very generously – “enthusiasm” for copyright reform. ®